When you see the rain coming (2019)

Take it from me. There is never a dull moment in these here West Indies. Most of it the wonders of a new people from different places in an old land. Some of it unwashed self-destructive chupidness, and a lot of it improvised survival measures – fidgety fingers in the dyke.

In order to survive, you need to keep your eyes wide open, so you can tell the vital differences. So you can see the rain that is coming.

I swear though, you only really appreciate this small place teeming with creativity and resilience, when you consider it as a single space; knowing that the breath you take at the Marché en Fer in Port-au-Prince has the scent (and sometimes stench) of Tunapuna and Stabroek in Guyana and Coronation in downtown Kingston on a Saturday morning.

All of this comes to light around this time every year when, for instance, a TS Karen sails through, sweeping T&T and delivering glancing blows on her way en route to oblivion in the Western Atlantic. Or worse, a Hurricane Dorian that early on hurried the journeys of small craft off our own coasts, as it prepped for a single-minded campaign of destruction in The Bahamas.

But there are other storms that hover like dark, low-hanging clouds and hang before us at eye level. No alerts. No warnings. No official dicta to ease pain and suffering. They are storms of our own doing, you see.

There are storm clouds, for instance, when you apply quintessentially racist values to restrict access to education to our children and jobs for adults. Few things like this to establish a penchant for self-destruction.

Even as we debate the point in T&T, there are ludicrous “grooming guidelines” for school children in Jamaica which, in my view, credit some hairstyles and punish the manner in which certain hair-types grow naturally.

In Barbados, teachers are known to blow the cover on boys who “pat down” their natural hair to what is considered to be an “acceptable” height. I am not sure what is correspondingly done to measure and to remediate the length of other hair types which run in a different direction.

Here, in T&T we have had more recent examples of such racist official behaviour in the form of acceptable and unacceptable “hairstyles” in our schools. Has it occurred to anyone that this is discriminatory to the extent that the “hairstyles” ritualistically under examination are not available as a stylistic option for people with other hair types? That school officials are implicitly drawn in the direction of only one group of people to extend censure and punishment?

Self-hating chupidness is what it is. Self-hate as a companion emotion to racism can be as destructive as the real ting self.

Take, as well, the so-called dress codes at public institutions. What is this issue with people’s shoulders? Why, in 38 degree heat, people cannot use comfortable clothes and footwear? Isn’t this some kind of self-hate? How can this be explained? What kind of collective pathological condition does this reflect?

During my brief assignment in Fiji some years ago, I joined in the sandal, sulu-wearing bunch around town and at public functions and wondered when we in the Caribbean would ever join the club of tropical island people who have learned to love their natural environment … and by extension, themselves.

Then comes one of the darkest clouds around – the looming storm of the theocratic state. The reality that so many of us would prefer personal religious conviction become coercive policy, rule and law. The dominance of supposedly sacred rites over otherwise acknowledged human rights.

This is not delinked from the self-hatred and lack of self-esteem and confidence witnessed with so many other issues. How could it be that one of the most oppressive instruments of our history as an under-class could arise as a singularly influential indicator of our value as humans?

Through this, discriminatory hate agendas are normalised and coercion becomes the norm. Put my name down in the book where it is recorded that some people here resisted racism, the theocracy and the self-hate. Put my name down among those who saw the dark clouds and shouted “Rain is coming!” The rain is coming.

 (First Published in the T&T Guardian on October 2, 2019)